Senior Principal - Platform Engineer LAN

Overview

Senior Principal Platform Engineer building and running GSK's local area network and campus switching platform as automated, secure, self-service infrastructure, setting the engineering standard and mentoring engineers.

What you'll do

• Design, build and automate platform infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and golden paths, so that provisioning is repeatable.
• Use AI-assisted engineering across code generation, review and testing to accelerate delivery and raise quality, reviewing AI-generated output before it is merged.
• Build self-service capabilities and paved roads that reduce friction for consuming teams.
• Engineer for reliability by defining SLOs, instrumenting platforms for observability and automating to reduce toil, working with the Site Reliability Engineer on standards.
• Set and uphold engineering standards, secure-by-default practices and code quality within the platform, and hold them in code review.
• Contribute to incident response and drive permanent automated fixes with Reliability Engineering rather than repeating manual recovery.
• Mentor and technically lead other engineers, including partner engineers, linking engineering work to platform OKRs and outcomes.
• Integrate and assure supplier or managed-service components, holding partner-delivered engineering to the same standards and code quality as internal work.
• Work the platform's manual task and toil backlog, converting identified candidates into automation and evidencing the effort removed.
• Close observability coverage gaps for the platform, so that reliability can be measured rather than inferred.
• Contribute engineering-led items to the platform backlog held by the Product Owner, including technical debt, upgrade and automation work, with the cost of not doing them stated.
• Apply the reference architectures and patterns set by the Platform Architect, and raise a case for change rather than diverging locally.

What you'll need

• Degree in a technology or engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics).
• Overall 15 years typically 6-8 years in platform, infrastructure or software engineering, including at least two years as the senior technical voice in a team.
• Deep hands-on depth in the relevant platform domain, whether cloud and hosting, network or digital workplace.
• Practical experience of infrastructure-as-code, for example Terraform, applied to production estates rather than proofs of concept.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, and with containers and Kubernetes where relevant to the platform.
• Track record building self-service capability that other teams adopted without hand-holding.
• Experience instrumenting for observability, defining SLOs and reducing toil through automation.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling, including judgement about when generated output is not fit to merge.
• Extensive experience engineering enterprise local area networks and campus switching services.
• Strong knowledge of routing, switching, segmentation, resilience and complex fault diagnosis.
• Evidence of applying standards and automation to improve deployment quality, reliability or supportability.

Nice to have

• Relevant technical certifications (e.g., a recognised cloud certification for AWS, GCP or Azure, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, or a network vendor certification relevant to the platform).
• Professional level enterprise networking certification, such as CCNP Enterprise or JNCIP Enterprise Routing and Switching.
• Experience with application programming interfaces, infrastructure as code or network assurance platforms.
• Experience supporting manufacturing, laboratory or operational technology networks.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru Luxor North Tower.
• Reports to the Engineering Director; works with the Platform Architect, Product Owner and Site Reliability Engineer.